CHAPTER XVII

THE NORTH-WEST

Winteringham—Alkborough and “Julian’s Bower”—Burton-Stather—Scunthorpe and Frodingham—Fillingham and Wycliff—Glentworth and Sir Christopher Wray—Laughton—Corringham—Gainsborough—The Old Hall—Lea and Sir Charles Anderson—Knaith and Sir Thomas Sutton—A Group of Early Church Towers—Lincolnshire Roads.

It is quite a surprise to the traveller in the north of the county to find so much that is really pretty in what looks on the map, from the artistic point of view, a trifle “flat and unprofitable,” but really there are few prettier bits of road in the county than that by “the Villages” under the northern Wolds, and there is another little bit of cliff near the mouth of the Trent which affords equally picturesque bits of village scenery combined with fine views over the Trent, Ouse, and Humber.

From _South Ferriby_ a byway runs alongside the water to _Winteringham_, from whence the Romans must have had a ferry to _Brough_, whence their great road went on to the north.

In _Winteringham_ church there are some good Norman arches, and a fine effigy of a knight in armour, said to be one of the Marmions. The road hence takes us by innumerable turns to _West Halton_, where the church is dedicated to St. Etheldreda, who is said to have hidden here from her husband Ecgfrith, when she was fleeing to Ely, at which place she founded the first monastery, in 672, six years before the building of the church at Stow. Murray notes that in the “Liber Eliensis” Halton is called Alftham.

Three miles to the south-east we find the large village of _Winterton_, just within a mile of the Ermine Street, and it is evident that a good many Romans had villas on the high ground looking towards the Humber, for both here and at _Roxby_, a mile to the south, good Roman pavements have been found, and another, four miles to the east, at Horkstow. Roxby church shows some pre-Norman stone work at the west end of the north aisle, and a fine series of canopied sedilia in the chancel, with unusually rich and lofty pinnacles. At _Winterton_ a Roman pavement was noticed by De la Pryme in 1699, and another with a figure of Ceres holding a cornucopia was discovered in 1797. The churchyard has an Early English cross, and the tower, which is engaged in the aisles, is of the primitive Romanesque type, with the Saxon belfry windows in the lower stage, and elegant Early English ones above. An early slab is over the west door, the nave has lofty octagonal pillars with bands of tooth ornament. The transepts are unusually wide and have rich Decorated windows. A Holy Family, by Raphael Mengs, forms the altarpiece.

[Sidenote: MAZES]

From here we go west to _Alkborough_, and on a grassy headland overlooking the junction of the Trent with the Ouse, we find a saucer-shaped hollow a few feet deep and forty-four feet across, at the bottom of which is a maze cut in the turf by monks 800 years ago. It is almost identical in pattern with one at Wing, near Uppingham, in Rutland, and unlike those “quaint mazes on the wanton green” mentioned in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which “for lack of tread are undistinguishable,” it has been kept cleared out, and a copy of it laid down in the porch, as we find to be done on one of the porch piers at Lucca Cathedral, and in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. These mazes were Christian adaptations of the Egyptian and Greek labyrinths, and were supposed to be allegorical of the mazes and entanglements of sin from which man can only get free if assisted by the guiding hand of Providence, or of Holy Church. Hence in a Christian Basilica in Algeria the words “Sancta Ecclesia” are arranged in a complicated fashion in the centre of the maze. Other mazes used to exist at Appleby, Louth, and Horncastle in Lincolnshire, and at Ripon one of the same pattern, but half as large again as the Alkborough maze, was only ploughed up in 1827. At Asenby in Yorkshire is a similar one still carefully kept clear. That on St. Catherine’s Hill, Winchester, is quadrangular and much simpler. At Leigh in Dorset is a “Miz Maze.” Northants, Notts, Wilts, Beds, Cambridge, and Gloucestershire, all had one at least. _Comberton_ in Cambridge has one of precisely the same pattern, and at _Hilton_, in Huntingdonshire, is one called by the same name as that at Alkborough, “Julian’s bower.” This is thought to be a reminiscence of the intricate ‘Troy’ game described in Virgil, _Aen._ v., 588-593, as played on horseback by Iulus and his comrades:—

“Ut quondam Creta fertur Labyrinthus in alta Parietibus textum caecis iter, ancipitemque Mille viis habuisse dolum, qua signa sequendi Falleret indeprensus et irremeabilis error. Haud alio Teucrum nati vestigia cursu Impediunt texuntque fugas et proelia ludo.”

And the fact that a labyrinthine figure cut in the turf near Burgh on the Solway by the Cumberland herdsmen was called “the walls of Troy” somewhat favours the interpretation. But it seems rather a far-fetched origin. Doubtless they served as an innocent recreation for the monks who lived at St. Anne’s chapel hard by, and the idea of such labyrinthine patterns is found in many churches abroad, for they are executed in coloured marbles, both in Rome and in the Early church of St. Vitale at Ravenna. The mazes formed of growing trees, as at Hampton Court, are more difficult to make out, as you cannot see the whole pattern at one time.

[Sidenote: ALKBOROUGH]

The church at _Alkborough_ was, like Croyland, a bone of contention between the monks of Spalding and Peterborough, each claiming it as a gift from the founder Thorold, in 1052. Tradition says that it was partly rebuilt by the three knights, Brito, Tracy, and Morville, who had taken refuge in this most remote corner of Lincolnshire, where one of them lived, after their murder of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The original Early tower and tower-arch remain, and a fragment of a very early cross is now to be seen by the north pier. One of the bells has this inscription:—

“Jesu for yi Modir sake Save all ye sauls that me gart make.”

[Sidenote: BURTON-STATHER]

In the village is a really beautiful old Tudor house of brick, with stone mullions, called Walcot Old Hall, the property of J. Goulton Constable, Esq. The little isolated bit of chalk wold which begins near Walcot is but four miles long, and in the centre of it is perched the village of _Burton-Stather_. The church stands on the very edge of the cliff, and a steep road leads down to the Staithe, a ferry landing stage, from which the village gets its name. Here, at a turn in the road, close to the village pump, still in universal use by the road side, we stopped to admire the wide and delightful view. The Trent was just below us. _Garthorpe_, where the other side of the ferry has its landing place, was in front, across the Trent lay the _Isle of Axholme_, green but featureless, and beyond it the sinuous Ouse, like a great gleaming snake, with the smoke of Goole rising up across the wide plain, and beyond the river, Howden tower; while, on a clear day, Selby Abbey and York Minster can be seen from the churchyard. We leave the village by an avenue of over-arching trees, and cross the Wold obliquely, passing Normanby Hall, the residence of Sir B. D. Sheffield, many of whose ancestors are buried in Burton-Stather church, and leaving the height, descend into a plain filled with smoke from the tall chimneys of the _Scunthorpe_ and _Frodingham_ iron furnaces. To come all at once on this recent industrial centre is a surprise after the bright clear atmosphere and keen air in which we have been revelling all day. But we soon leave the tall chimneys behind and find that the road divides; the left passing over to the “Cliff” at _Raventhorpe_ near _Broughton_ on the Ermine Street, and continuing south past _Manton_, where the black-headed gull, “_Larus Ridibundus_,” the commonest of all the gulls on the south coast of England, breeds on land belonging to Sir Sutton Nelthorpe of Scawby, to _Kirton in Lindsey_, and so by _Blyborough_, _Willoughton_, _Hemswell_, and _Harpswell_, to _Spital-on-the-Street_; and thence by _Glentworth_ and _Fillingham_ to Lincoln.

Of these places _Blyborough_ is curiously dedicated to St. Alkmund, a Northumbrian Saint, to whom also is dedicated a church founded in the ninth century by the daughter of Alfred the Great in Shrewsbury. _Willoughton_ once had a preceptory of the Templars, founded in 1170.

_Harpswell_ in its Early Norman, or possibly pre-Norman, tower has a mid-wall shaft carved with chevron ornament, similar to that in the upper of two sets of early double lights on the south side of the tower of Appleton-le-Strey near Malton in Yorkshire. It also possesses a clock which was given in memory of the victory at Culloden, 1746. Moreover it contains several fine monuments; but _Glentworth_ and _Fillingham_ are of more interest than all these. _Glentworth_, for its very interesting church, and _Fillingham_, because from 1361 to 1368 it was the home of the great John Wyclif, who held the living as a ‘fellow’ of Balliol College, Oxford.

[Sidenote: WYCLIF]

Wyclif was made Master of Balliol in 1360, and became rector of Fillingham in the same year. In 1368 he moved to Ludgershall in Bucks, and in 1374 to Lutterworth, where he died on December 31, 1384. He was a consistent opposer of the doctrine of transubstantiation, for which he was condemned by the University of Oxford; and he renounced allegiance to the Pope, who issued no less than five Bulls against him. The Archbishop of Canterbury persecuted him in his latter years, and forty-four years after his death his bones were exhumed and burnt by order of the Synod of Constance, and the ashes cast into the Swift. He made the first complete translation of the Bible into English from the Vulgate, and in this he was assisted by Nicolas of Hereford, who took the Old Testament, Wyclif doing the New. Chaucer, who died in 1400, thus describes him in his Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales”:—

A good man was ther of religioun, And was a poure Persoun of a toun; But riche he was of holy thought and werk. He was also a lerned man, a clerk That Christes gospel trewly wolde preche.

Wide was his parische, and houses fer asonder, But he ne lefte not for reyne ne thonder, In sicknesse nor in mischiefe to visite The ferrest in his parische, muche and lite, Upon his feet, and in his hand a staf. This noble ensample to his sheep he gaf, That first he wrought and afterward be taughte. Out of the Gospel he the wordes caughte And this figure he added eek thereto, That if golde ruste, what shal iren do?

A better preest, I trowe, ther nowher non is, He wayted after no pompe and reverence, Ne maked him a spiced conscience, But Christes lore, and his apostles twelve, He taught, but first he folowed it himselve.

[Sidenote: SIR CHRISTOPHER WRAY]

_Glentworth_ has a typical pre-Norman tower, built of small stones with dressed quoins. It has the two stringcourses, the first being two-thirds of the way up from the ground with only thin slits for lights below it and with the usual mid-wall shaft in the belfry window above it, but with an unusual impost; a slab with a boldly-cut cross on it forms the jamb in the light over the west window, and the south side shows ornamentation similar to that which we noticed at Stow. Besides the tower, the chancel-arch and a narrow priest’s door are all that remains of the Early work. The monument to Sir Christopher Wray, who lived here from 1574 to 1592, is a very fine one. The judge is represented in his robes and hat, with ruff, which his wife also wears, she having a hood and gown with jewelled stomacher. Four daughters are figured kneeling below, while the son kneels above in armour. Marble pillars with Corinthian capitals support the arch over the recess in which the figures lie, and it was once richly coloured and enclosed by a screen of wrought ironwork.

The right hand road from Scunthorpe runs down the centre of the plain half-way between the Cliff and the Trent, through a number of villages. Of these _Ashby_ still maintains a Duck Decoy near the Trent. _Bottesford_ has a fine cruciform church, with a handsome chancel, having narrow deep-set lancet windows of unusual length, ornamented with tooth moulding, a singular arrangement of alternate lancet and circular windows in the clerestory, and stone seats round the Early English arcade pillars, as at Claypole. _Messingham_, with its stained-glass and oak furniture collected by Archdeacon Bailey from various churches in his Archdeaconry and elsewhere, as also _Scotter_ and _Scotton_, are but milestones on the way to _Northorpe_, where are two good doorways, one Norman, and one, in the south porch, Decorated, with fine carved foliage, and the old door still in use. The western bays of the arcade are built into the walls of the Perpendicular tower, which has been inserted between them. A sepulchral brass with inscription to Anthony Moreson, 1648, has been inserted into an old altar slab, shown as such by its five crosses. Thanks to Mrs. Meynell Ingram the church of _Laughton_, three miles west of Northorpe, was beautifully restored by Bodley and Garner in 1896. Here is a very fine brass of a knight of the Dalison (D’Alençon) family, about 1400, which, like that of Thomas and Johanna Massingberd at Gunby, has been made to serve again by a parsimonious Dalison of a later century.

Roads lead both from _Northorpe_ and _Laughton_ to _Corringham_. This village is on the great east-and-west highway from Gainsborough to Market-Rasen, and here, too, the fine Transition Norman church has been magnificently restored by Bodley at the sole cost of Miss Beckett, of Somerby Hall. It now has a fine rood-screen, good modern stained-glass windows, and a painting of the adoration of the Magi for a reredos. There is here a brass in memory of Robert and Thomas Broxholme, 1631, placed by their brother and sister, Henry and Mary, who all had “lived together above sixty years and for the most parte of the time in one family in most brotherly concord.” A long rhymed epitaph goes on to say:—

“Though none of them had Husband Child or Wife They mist no blessings of the married life; For to the poore they eva were insteed Of Husband Wife and Parent at their need.”

[Sidenote: GAINSBOROUGH]

[Sidenote: “THE MILL ON THE FLOSS”]

From _Corringham_ a turn to the right brings us after four miles to _Gainsborough_. From this town on the extreme edge of the county four roads and four railway lines radiate, and the Trent runs along the edge of the town with a good wide bridge over it, built in 1790, for which a stiff toll is demanded. It is described by George Eliot in “The Mill on the Floss,” as “St. Oggs,” where the ‘Eagre’ or ‘bore’ is thus poetically referred to. “The broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea; and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.” Constantly overrun by the Danes, the town was eventually looked on as his capital city by Swegen, who, with his son Canute, brought his vessels up the Trent in 1013, and died here, “full King of the Country,” in 1014. In the Civil War it was occupied first by the Royalists and afterwards by the Parliamentarians, and one of Cromwell’s first successful engagements was a cavalry skirmish at _Lea_, two miles to the south, when he routed and killed General Cavendish, whom he drove “with some of his soldiers into a quagmire,” still called ‘Cavendish bog.’ The place has some large iron works and several seed-crushing mills for oil and oil-cake, and much river traffic is done in large barges. Talking of barges, Gainsborough has the credit of having owned the first steam-packet seen in Lincolnshire waters. This was the ‘Caledonia,’ built at Glasgow, and brought round by the Caledonian Canal, to the astonishment of all the east coast fishermen, in 1815. She was a cargo boat, but she took passengers to Hull, and was a great boon to the villages on the Trent.

[Illustration: _North Side, Old Hall, Gainsborough._]

[Illustration: _South Side, Old Hall, Gainsborough._]

[Sidenote: THE OLD HALL]

River traffic below Gainsborough is somewhat hampered during the time of spring tides by the Eagre, which, when the in-rushing tide overcomes the river current and rides on the surface of the stream, rising in a wave six or seven feet high, rolls on from the mouth of the Trent to Gainsborough, a distance of more than twenty miles. The long street leading to the bridge is so dirty and narrow that you cannot believe as you go down it that you are in the main artery of the town. But when you have crossed the bridge and look back, the long riverside with its wharf and red brick houses, boats, and barges, has a very picturesque and old-world effect. The great sight of the town is the Old Hall, which stands on a grassy plot of some two acres, with a very poor iron railing round it, and a road all round that. In the middle of this rough grass-grown plot in the heart of the town is a charming old baronial hall, rebuilt in the times of Henry VII. and Elizabeth, after its destruction in 1470, and still occupied as a private residence. There was doubtless a building here before the time of the Conquest, and here it would be that Alfred the Great stopped on the occasion of his marriage with Ethelwith, daughter of Ethelred, and here, too, it would be that Swegen died, and his son Canute held his court. The present building is of brick and timber with a fine stone-built oriel on the north side, as the centre of a long frontage, and is of various patterns, having tall chimneys and buttresses on the west, and a brick tower on the north-east, and two wings on the south projecting from a magnificent central hall with much glass and woodwork, and a lantern. The large kitchen with its two huge fireplaces is at the end of this hall. Henry VIII. and Katharine Howard were entertained here by Lord Burgh, whose ancestor rebuilt the hall in Henry VII.’s time, _c._ 1480; and another of his Queens, Katharine Parr, was often here, being at one time the wife of Lord Burgh’s eldest son.

[Sidenote: THE MASTER BUILDER]

The wide area round the hall, with its untidy grass and the miserable iron fence, gives a singularly forlorn appearance to a beautiful and uncommon-looking building. It is supposed that the famous master-builder, “Richard de Gaynisburgh,” was born at Gainsborough, with whom, then styled “Richard de Stow,” the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln in 1306 contracted “to attend to and employ other masons under him for the new work,” at the time when the new additional east end or Angel Choir as well as the upper parts of the great tower and the transepts were being built. He contracted “to do the plain work by measure, and the fine carved work and images by the day.” One of the Pilgrim Fathers was a Gainsborough man, and a Congregational Chapel has been built as a memorial to him.

From Gainsborough, going north, we come at once to _Thonock_ Hall, the seat of Sir Hickman Bacon, the premier baronet of England, and _Morton_ is just to the west, where the church has a very good new rood screen and five Morris windows, from designs by Burne-Jones. Between Morton and Thonock is a large Danish camp, called Castle Hills, with a double fosse. On the other side of the town the westernmost road of the county runs south by _Lea_, _Knaith_, and _Gate Burton_ to _Marton_, and thence to _Torksey_, which in early times was a bigger place than Gainsborough, and so on to _Newark_, but another road branches off by _Torksey_ to the left, for _Saxilby_ and Lincoln, twelve miles distant.

[Sidenote: SIR CHARLES ANDERSON]

_Lea_ church stands high, and has a chantry in which is a cross-legged knight, Sir Ranulph Trehampton, 1300, and some good early glass of about 1330. Of Trehampton’s manor-house only the site remains, but the hall, which is full of antiquarian treasures, was the home of that well-known Lincolnshire worthy Sir Charles Anderson, Bart., the county antiquarian, 1804-1891. He was a charming personality. The following story, referring to him, was told me by that delightful teller of good stories, the Very Rev. Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester. At the time when a railway was being cut (between Lincoln and Gainsborough probably, for that passes through Lea), but at all events in a part of the county in which Sir Charles took a great interest, he was visiting the works, when an insinuating Irish navvy stopped and looked at him and then said, “So you’re Sir Charles Anderson, are ye? Sure now there’s scores of Andersons where I come from; there’s one now in Sligo, a saddler. Ach! he’s a good fellow is that; the rale gintleman. He gives without asking.” Then, after a pause, “You’ve a look of ’em.” The Andersons lived in Lincolnshire from the days of Richard II., first at Wrawby then at Flixborough, temp. Henry VII.

[Illustration: _Gainsborough Church._]

_Knaith_ is noticeable as being the birthplace, in 1532, of Thomas Sutton, the founder of the Charterhouse in London, where he is buried. The church has what is not at all common in English churches, a baldacchino over the altar, but in fact it is not an ordinary church, being just a part of an old Cistercian nunnery, founded by Ralph Evermue, about 1180.

[Sidenote: THE CHARTERHOUSE]

Thomas Sutton was of Lincoln parents. He served in the army and was made inspector of the King’s Artillery. Having leased some land in the county of Durham, he proceeded to work the coal there, and became very wealthy, in fact the wealthiest commoner in the realm, and with at least £5,000 a year, so that he was able to give Lord Suffolk £13,000 for the house then called Howard House in Middlesex, which had been the original Charterhouse, founded in 1371 by Sir Walter Manney and dissolved in 1535. This was in May, 1611. He wished to do something to benefit the nation, but he left the details to the Crown. He died in December of the same year, but his charity was arranged to support eighty poor folk, and to teach forty boys, being, like Robert Johnson’s foundation at Uppingham, both a hospital and a school. The hospital remains in its old buildings in London, the school was moved in 1872 to Godalming, where it greatly flourishes.

A central road runs through the middle of the flat country, half-way between the Lincoln-and-Gainsborough road and the Ridge. This takes us from _Corringham_ by a string of small villages to _Stow_, and thence by _Sturton_ to _Saxilby_, and so back to Lincoln. Of those villages _Springthorpe_ and _Heapham_ both have the early unbuttressed towers, described in Chapters XXII. and XXIII., the former with herring-bone masonry, the latter, like Marton, is unfortunately covered with stucco. In the next village of _Upton_ again we find herring-bone masonry; at _Willingham-by-Stow_, the base of the tower is early Norman; so that in spite of the ruthless way in which succeeding styles destroyed the work of their predecessors, we have a large group in this neighbourhood of churches whose early Norman or even Saxon work is still visible. At _Sturton_ is a good brick church by Pearson, reminding one of that by Gilbert Scott at Fulney, just outside Spalding.

[Sidenote: LINCOLNSHIRE ROADS]

A few years ago, when the first motor made its way into Lincolnshire, the road from Gainsborough to Louth was one long stretch of small loose stones. It had never even dreamt of a steam roller, and there were always ruts for the wheels, and as Lincolnshire carriage wheels were set three or four inches wider apart so that they could accommodate themselves to the cart ruts, when we brought a carriage up from Oxfordshire it was found impossible to use it till the axles had been cut and lengthened so that it could run in the ruts. But this was a great improvement on the days my grandmother remembered, when it took four stout horses to draw a carriage at foot’s pace from Ingoldmells to Spilsby (and this was only 100 years ago), or when Sir Charles Anderson saw a small cart-load of corn stuck on the road and thatched down for the winter there, doubtless belonging to a small farmer who had but one horse, which could not draw the load home. Mention is made in this chapter of Scunthorpe. The iron workers there appear to be keen footballers, for I notice that there is now (December, 1913) one family there of eleven brothers between the ages of 18 and 43, ten of them experienced players, who challenge any single family anywhere to play two matches, one at the home of each team. I wonder if any family of eleven stalwart sons will be found to take them on.

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